It’s Time for NCSBE to Answer Major Dave’s Questions

March 18, 2019

Dave (“Major Dave”) Goetze

Mar 18, 2019 (Raleigh) — Those of you not into using Facebook for politics can be forgiven for not knowing about the selfless research conducted by Dave Goetze (a.k.a. “Major Dave”), a retired Army Military Police type who knows a thing or two about investigations, but today your blissful ignorance ends.

He normally posts analysis that suggests election officials are adjusting the results of elections long after the races are certified and this raises policy concerns about forensic data management practices.

In 2014, VIP discovered that registration data was not being archived by SBOE more than once or twice a year and that makes it conveniently difficult to detect things like false registrations and phantom voters, so we’ve watched Maj Dave’s work with great interest.

Any adjustments to election results, voter registrations, and voter histories should be carefully noted in an audit log, but getting such detailed information out of the one-deep PIO shop at SBOE often takes more effort than it’s worth.

At any rate, many of Maj Dave’s findings involve small numbers that make people happy he’s on the case, but too puzzled to get excited about the impact of his findings.

We (at VIP) can imagine a few plausible explanations for this oddity but would prefer not to speculate. Instead, we’ll raise a few questions that lawmakers might need to ask SBOE:

Who at the Meck (or NC) BOE assigned the voter ID number to these voters?

When were these numbers assigned?

Why are they sequential, but the registration dates are NOT sequential?

Their ballots all counted, but some have a registration date ten days after the election. Is this normal?

Is Maj Dave correct in saying that some of the voters “have no record of ever being registered or removed from the counties where those previous votes are shown to have been cast”?

Could somebody at SBOE please sit down and write a note to explain why this is (or is not) the normal way provisional ballots are supposed to be ingested?

BTW, we hear rumors of behind-the-scenes downplaying of Maj Dave’s work among certain elite circles, but the House District 103 race had a razor-thin margin that may have been “tainted” by such data manipulation.